Tragedy

Tragedy (Ancient Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia, "he-goat-song"]. is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilisation. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes anTragedy (Ancient Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia, "he-goat-song"]. is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilisation. That tradition has been multiple and discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it. From its obscure origins in the theatres of Athens 2,500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, and Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, and Müller's postmodernist reworkings of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the tragic form. In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic, and epic theatre....more

This group is intended for recommending books to a variety of people and sharing your thoughts o…more

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This group is intended for recommending books to a variety of people and sharing your thoughts on what you read. Also you can share your interests and must-reads, new competitions and new authors. If you are a new author trying to get your book out there, you might want to post a link so people can take a look at your book.
Every month, we will all read a book and than rate it out of ten.

In this group we will be tackling the complete works of William Shakespeare, one play per month,…more

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In this group we will be tackling the complete works of William Shakespeare, one play per month, in whatever order I can justify at the time.
I'll be posting a general discussion, as well as a deep dive into a specific passage, for each play on my booktube channel (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5qBKZan4C7SMcuy5VIPFMQ). If you also make a video (or blog post), do post it in the appropriate thread.
Upcoming Schedule:
July 2018 - Othello
August 2018 - Much Ado About Nothing
September 2018 - The Winter's Tale